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Doubleclick Exits The Ad-Tracking Business
Masem writes: "Cnet is reporting that Doubleclick closed down its ad tracking program as of Dec 31 2001, and is shifting from a media company to research and development for online ventures. Doubleclick claims they had upwards of 100million unique tracking profiles at the height of their run, but with the dot-com bust and lower ad revenue rates, ad tracking ran into the red. Even after the worrisome aquition of Abacus Online (which was rumored to allow Doubleclick to connect online and offline consumer profiles), the company could not turn a buck on ad revenues. Time to remove that 'doubleclick.com 127.0.0.1' from /etc/hosts now?""
Ad banners have become an overlookable feature in most web pages. I would like to see further studies in targeted advertising. I mean, I hate the outdoors, pop music and fast food. Why show me ads for places to camp, discounts on CD-NOW, and contests with McDonalds?
Click here or here.
What will happen to all the collected data? Will they sell it? Keep it? Destroy it?
Well, that's going to change. By analogy (to drag that up again), in 1981, USENET posters generally thought it would be impractical for a long time to come to put all USENET postings on the Internet. By the mid-90's, it had happened. You can bet that in the not too distant future, it will be so cheap to record and correlate all you on-line activities that no company will think twice about doing it--unless the law prevents them from doing it.
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> True, it may build brand recognition, and increase word-of-mouth talk about a particular company or item, but where's the proof in the pudding?
Hey, you were in the ad biz. You know as well as I do that an ad agent is a con man whose job it is to con his customers into thinking he can con his customers' customers.
As a marketroid once told a friend of mine, "If the customer leaves your site, having bought exactly what he wanted to buy, you haven't sold anything".
As I wish I'd been there to tell the marketroid - "Get the fsck out of my office." ;-)
The problem with that is, the way Netscape 4.77 (Windows) seems to load pages, is, it won't fully render the page until these ad banners have timed out. This problem is particularly noticable on MyYahoo.
For this reason, I switched to IE and IE does not do this - I get to see the content sooner. Sucks, because, otherwise, I would continue to use Netscape.
However, Netscape (Macintosh) does not seem to have this problem.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Think people ... why do you have ads?
...
... ?
... (and I'm not talking Amazon here)
... there's no reason why they can't commoditise other mass market non-perishable bundles (think personal care kits, think entire kitchenware, think car personalisation). The biggest barrier to adoption has always been social ... the better micetrap doesn't work beyond a certain point. It's all about distribution, reliability, after-sales service, etc ...
... this is a directory problem. Already you see personal advertising in newspapers disappearing due to specialised employment agencies, help-desks, ... I see this trend also happening to banner-ads. People will go to specific trading sites which persists reputations rather than wanting to be inundated with services they don't need at the moment.
... the other ads that are left are the branding which are image/style based ... frankly those wish to be associated with an experience and reminding the user that you're responsible for a over-limit bandwidth bill and a waste of time is not good karma. Coke and Pepsi sponsor rock concerts not sport statistics.
... movie trailers which use products that normal people can identify with and feel part of the crowd. I can talk about social alienation in cities which lead people to identify with their professional peers rather than neighbours but this is a geek-site not socio-economic trend analysis.
To sell something
What is the most efficient market for selling stuff
If you study the nobel prize winner of a few years ago, you'd discover that dutch auctions can be theoretically proven to be the most efficient price discovery process.
Guess who's implementing auctions in a massive way?
The same group that's expanding from collectibles to cars to sports gear to CDs
Already large-scale companies are dumping overstocked or out-dated goods on eBay
OK that's the long-term killer for ads. Now what about service organisations (ie offering something other than tangible goods). The service is about finding someone to do something that you can't do yourself
So
In summary, unless there are some fundamental problems with my observations, I would say that ads as we know them (banner, etc) will become ineffective due to going under the personal threshold of normal perception. Go to a rural place and you'd really notice the *ABSENCE* of billboards. Instead you will be mor eproduct placements
In summary, IMHO pure ad-driven renue models will fail. It might have worked for the radio-broadcasting industry which requires continuous listening but unless something radical happens to social perception of the internet, the ability to jump-click outside a walled domain, and the fundamental cost-structure (ads=bandwidth=costs) I don't see them being viable.
Of course the 64 million dollar question is what is a viable business model which all the VCs would give their souls (or unmortgaged remainder thereof) to discover.
LL
Ahh, but what if it's a trick specially *designed* to make us remove the ads.doubleclick entry from our personal blackhole lists? I can see it now. Four months from now, they'll announce their return to user-tracking, and will in fact have continued to track all us innocent users the whole time! :-)
*lol*
Zarchon